Dear Lifehacker,
I read a lot of blogs. We're talking 1000+ unread items. It seems like I can never get through everything I want to read, and I just have bookmarks loading up in my toolbar that never get read. How can I actually get through all this stuff?

Sincerely,
Buried Under Blogs

Dear Buried,
As someone who flips through hundreds of blogs a day, I (and the rest of team Lifehacker) definitely feel your pain. There are a lot of different ways to tackle this, and ultimately it'll depend on what suits you best, but here are some tips we've learned over the past few years (and hopefully our readers will share all their tips in the discussion below, too).

Use RSS Feeds, and Cut Out the Cruft

RSS Feeds are still the most efficient way to get through a large number of blogs. Fancy news readers like Pulse or Flipboard are nice, but a straightforward app like Google Reader is going to be much faster—instead of casually browsing, you're speeding through all your feeds, picking out the stuff that looks interesting to you. We'll get to the details on that in a moment.

First, gather up your favorite sites and add them to Google Reader if you haven't already. If you have any blogs you don't read a lot, just skip them. If you read a blog that posts too much, see if they have a more limited feed that, say, only contains the stuff you're actually interested in—like our tag-based feeds. Then, once they're in Google Reader, organize them for optimal efficiency—tag the blogs you absolutely have to read every day, followed by the blogs that don't necessarily require your constant attention, and so on.

Dear Lifehacker, I subscribe to a lot of newsfeeds, which makes me feel like I'm on top of…
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Read the Short Stuff Now, Save the Long Stuff for Later

When you're sitting at your computer with nothing to do and want to start going through your blogs, you can breeze through Google Reader with just a few strokes of the "j" key. After awhile, you'll get pretty good at scanning headlines and knowing what you want to read. I generally will read the shorter posts right then and there, then move on. When I come across longer articles that look interesting, I'll send them to my read-it-later app of choice, Readability (though you can use Instapaper or Pocket too). This IFTTT recipe will make it especially easy to do so: it will send any article you "star" straight to your reading app of choice. So, as you flip through with "j," you can just tap the "s" key for any longform article that looks interesting and it'll show up on your read later list.

Bookmark and Read Later apps like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability are awesome ways to store and …
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You can then read those longer articles at your leisure, whether you're on your computer or not. I have Readability on my phone, my iPad, and even on my Nook, so no matter where I am, I can read some of my stored articles when I have some free moments (waiting for the train, waiting in line at the DMV, or whatever). Most of them have offline access, which means you'll have them even without wi-fi. Heck, you can even have Pocket read articles to you out loud while you're driving on your commute.

Android: Pocket, one of our favorite bookmark-and-read-later apps, just updated with a…
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Accept That You'll Never Get Through Everything

The last thing I learned was that sometimes, you just aren't going to get Google reader to read "0 unread." It's okay to declare RSS bankruptcy and just mark all as read—you've got more important things to do than get through every single blog post on the internet anyway. In fact, you can actually hide unread counts in Google Reader by clicking the arrow next to "All Items." This will help put your mind at ease, and keep that large number from staring you in the face and making you feel like you're "behind" on something.

Similarly, prune your "read later" list if it gets too unwieldy. If you've had an article sitting in your read later list for a month, just delete it—you probably weren't as interested in it as you thought. Or save it for your next long plane ride. Or just learn to read faster.